Has the NVIDIA Iray renderer been updated?

Yes, it has.

*Note:The entries below come directly from the NVIDIA Iray 2015.3.11 release notes. Some entries, such as the mention of Linux support, have no bearing on Daz Studio itself but are included for completeness.

Iray 2015.3.11, build 246000.20154

Added and Changed Features

General

Trial licensing is now supported on Linux as well.

Fixed Bugs

General

A memory leak when displacement changes got applied has been fixed

When changing displacement settings interactively, resetting these to the original value was not handled properly. This has been fixed.

Some issues with trial licensing have been resolved. When trial licenses for Iray-based plugins were used either by multiple users or multiple applications on one machine, some issues occurred. The same was true when the system time was changed (e.g. daylight saving time was switched). All of these problems have been addressed.

Iray Photoreal

An issue in detecting invalid geometry when running Iray Photoreal with "iay optix prime" off has been fixed.

Problems with procedural noise functions used as displacement have been fixed.

Occasional rendering failures when a single host failed while rendering with multiple hosts have been fixed.

Material Definition Language (MDL)

Code generation for the terniary operator in the JIT backend has been fixed.

Iray 2015.3.10, build 246000.18637

Added and Changed Features

General

Multiple users are now allowed to run the same trial license of a product on the same machine. It is not possible for multiple users to use individual trial licenses on the same machine.

Fixed Bugs

General

An RDMA hang that previously occurred with multiple concurrent transmissions (e.g., heavy load) has been fixed.

Material Definition Language (MDL)

The warning "’n’ is written but not read" has sometimes been issued wrongly. This has been fixed.

Iray 2015.3.9, build 246000.16951

Added and Changed Features

Iray Bridge

The Iray Bridge snapshot context now supports the "bridge address" and "bridge security token" options, same as for the cloud render contexts. This is the preferred way of configuring the bridge address and security token, both for cloud render contexts and snapshot contexts.

Cloud render/snapshot contexts will no longer react to changes to the global bridge application address and security token. The global value will be used as a default if "bridge address" and "bridge security token" options are not set on the render context or snapshot context. The preferred way is to configure each context individually rather than use the global setting.

Material Definition Language (MDL)

The non-standard \X escape code has been removed from the MDL compiler (use \x instead).

Fixed Bugs

Iray Bridge

A problem when database elements larger than 953 MB were transmitted over Iray Bridge has been fixed.

When multiple users were saving snapshots to Iray Server at the same time this could lead to failures. This has been fixed.

Iray Photoreal

An infrequent hang with the caustic sampler enabled after a scene edit has been fixed.

Unexpected noise after editing a light source in scenes with very few light triangles has been fixed.

An issue with huge geometry/triangle counts when using "iray optix prime off" has been fixed.

Iray Interactive

A bug has been fixed that caused a driver timeout or system crash on graphics drivers of version 364 or later.

Material Definition Language (MDL)

The auto type analysis of uniform array types inside the MDL core compiler that could lead to wrong/missing error messages has been fixed.

The auto type analysis calculating wrong dependencies for multiple assignments in the MDL core compiler that could lead to wrong/missing error messages has been fixed.

Rare crashes in the MDL compiler if an enum type must be implicitely converted to an integer has been fixed.

The MDL compiler now correctly inlines material presets if used inside the body of other materials.

The auto type dependency calculation for array constructor calls in the MDL core compiler that could lead to wrong/missing error messages has been fixed.

The MDL compiler now correctly issues an error if the material preset default values do not form a continuous set at the end of the parameters.

A rarely occuring memory leak in MDL has been fixed.

The MDL core compiler erroneously ate up the next character following an octal or hexadecimal escape code. This and the \0 escape have been fixed.

The MDL preset export which missed necessary imports for user defined types in some rare cases has been fixed.

Iray 2015.3.8, build 246000.12076

Fixed Bugs

General

Interactive changes to the scene unit attribute (meters per scene unit) were not reported to the Iray Interactive and Iray Realtime renderers. This has been fixed.

Iray Photoreal

Incorrect handling of nested base::transform coordinate has been fixed.

The incorrect implementation of the projection transform in cylinder mode of base::coordinate projection (only triggered in conjunction with JIT-compiled MDL code) has been fixed.

A bug has been fixed that resulted in noise or energy loss after editing light sources like changing intensity, moving around, etc.

Material Definition Language (MDL)

Iray supports only uniform values for material.volume.absorption coefficient and material.volume.scattering coefficient while the MDL specification allows varying values here. A warning is now issued in that case and the values are set to 0.0 in the non-uniform case.

Rare cases have been fixed, where expressions containing math operators were identified as varying instead of uniform. The wrong detection caused either unsupported value warnings or runtime penalties.

The MDL core compiler auto type analysis on array types when modifiers are involved has been fixed. In some rare cases this could have led to wrong calculations of varying/uniform property of values, causing either wrong errors to be generated or wrong code to be passed.

Auto type analysis calculating wrong dependencies for multiple assignments has been fixed. For assignments like a = b = c or implicit assignments like return a = b, the dependency was calculated faultily, causing either wrong errors to be generated or wrong code to be passed.

The MDL core compiler’s implicit type conversion rules for enum types has been fixed, avoiding crashes in some rare cases.

The MDL compiler’s handling of material presets has been fixed. These can now be correctly inlined when used inside material bodies. This enhances the precision of several analyses inside the compiler and avoids some "possible different transmission on both side of a material" errors.

The auto type dependency calculation for array constructor calls has been fixed. This could have led occasionally to wrong calculations of varying/uniform property of values, causing either wrong errors to be generated or wrong code to be passed.

Iray 2015.3.7, build 246000.10766

Added and Changed Features

Material Definition Language (MDL)

Error detection for unsupported varying values on the absorption and scattering coefficients of the MDL volumetric material properties has been added.

Builtin support for the nested use of the base::transform coordinate() functions in MDL materials has been added.

Fixed Bugs

Iray Photoreal

An additional check against unusable devices has been added.

Iray Interactive

A deadlock when the cpu limit was set to 1 has been fixed.

Acrash on exit of the Iray Interactive plugin when it was initialized but no render context was created has been fixed.

Material Definition Language (MDL)

A crash bug in the case that the expression for a MDL material definition was not of type material has been fixed. The compiler reports now a proper error message.

A crash bug for certain JIT-compiled MDL materials on Windows 8 has been fixed.

An overflow check to protect against huge triangle counts has been added.

Wrong results for MDL materials which used a base::transform coordinate() function as argument to another base::transform coordinate() function have been fixed.

A problem with transformed cylindrical projections in the base::coordinate projection() function has been fixed that caused the result to look wrong if the function was JIT-compiled.

A bug that could have caused undeterministic rendering results on materials with specific uniform expressions on the absorption and scattering coefficients of the MDL volumetric material properties has been added.

When I run the update, will it ovwerwrite my Style and Layout settings that I customized so that it works for me best?

I have DS 4.9.1.30 right now.

Is it advisable to update to a Beta Version, I am a bit worried but of course would like ot have the latest options.

No, the beta has separate settings from the release version anyway (so you won't have your layout but it won't be lost). Even when you do update the release version your current and saved layouts will not be overwritten (modified styles that ahven't been saved under a new name may - I know I had to reset my modified highlight colour on the Darkside style fairly often).

I've noticed that if I do an Interactive Iray Preview in the Viewport, GPU-Z says that memory is not freed up when I change back to Texture Shaded. If I then try to render my scene in Photoreal mode, I don't have enough GPU memory left and if falls back to CPU and takes forever. It used to crash with Interactive mode if I had an HDRI in the Render Settings environment. Now it doesn't crash, it just won't release the memory.

I know this is a tiny niggle but it's still annoying after all this time.

Can you PLEASE set up the image save after a render to save when one hits the Enter key on the keyboard? If not why? Seems like a very intuitive action but nope, not for saving out an image, we have to hit the OK button... silly!

I know this is a tiny niggle but it's still annoying after all this time.

Can you PLEASE set up the image save after a render to save when one hits the Enter key on the keyboard? If not why? Seems like a very intuitive action but nope, not for saving out an image, we have to hit the OK button... silly!

I know this is a tiny niggle but it's still annoying after all this time.

Can you PLEASE set up the image save after a render to save when one hits the Enter key on the keyboard? If not why? Seems like a very intuitive action but nope, not for saving out an image, we have to hit the OK button... silly!

I third the motion! This is pretty standard behavior in Windows, I am not sure about the MAC world.

Glossiness Squared?? Can anyone enlighten me to what that is? I tried looking but haven't found an answer yet.

DAZ uses a method similar to what the Walt Disney Animation Studios implemented in their so-called "Disney 'principled' BRDF" [if I remember correctly, in use since "Wreck-It Ralph" (2012)].

To have a (qoute-unquote) "more perceptually linear change in the roughness" (a physically based renderer simply doesn't know what Glossiness is, it knows only Roughness), the (final) roughness value used for rendering calculations is the square of the value put into the parameter field. That results in, that an input of 0.5 will be actually only a 0.25. When using measured values on such a shader, one needs to calculate the square root of that value to get what he actually wants. (For a measured value of 0.3 the square root is 0.5477226 for example).

That's the method already in use on the PBR Metallicity/Roughness setup of the Iray Uber shader since the first Beta. On PBR Specular/Glossiness on the other hand, if you put in a 0.7 it was really a 0.3, because for rendering calculations the value will be (internally) reverted back to "Roughness" or 0.3 (The result of 1.0 - input value). The different methods (calculations) resulted in, that a value for 0.3 using PBR Metallicity/Roughness didn't visually match a 0.7 of PBR Specular/Glossiness in the final render, although it should have, as "Glossiness" is just the reverse of "Roughness".

I know this is a tiny niggle but it's still annoying after all this time.

Can you PLEASE set up the image save after a render to save when one hits the Enter key on the keyboard? If not why? Seems like a very intuitive action but nope, not for saving out an image, we have to hit the OK button... silly!

I know this is a tiny niggle but it's still annoying after all this time.

Can you PLEASE set up the image save after a render to save when one hits the Enter key on the keyboard? If not why? Seems like a very intuitive action but nope, not for saving out an image, we have to hit the OK button... silly!

I know this is a tiny niggle but it's still annoying after all this time.

Can you PLEASE set up the image save after a render to save when one hits the Enter key on the keyboard? If not why? Seems like a very intuitive action but nope, not for saving out an image, we have to hit the OK button... silly!

Yes it's agrevating. Also if you plug in the file extension .png it will add the .png twice. Ex: "deleteTHIS.png.png" This has been true since at least DS 4.8.